The Creator Is Not a Media Channel

Most creator budgets in the FTSE 100 and the S&P 500 sit on the media line. They are approved, tracked, and measured against the same efficiency metrics as programmatic display. That placement is the first signal that the capital is being misdeployed.

Three independent practitioners, working across talent management, platform research, and digital rights infrastructure, have converged on the same conclusion. Treating creators as a media channel produces the operational economics of a media channel. Treating creators as business partners produces partnership economics. The two outputs are not close. The difference between a brand sponsorship deal and an equity-shared product venture is not a slightly higher return on the same spend. It is a categorical reclassification of the capital at work.

For a C-suite looking at the creator line on next year's marketing budget, the question is not whether the category is worth the allocation. The creator economy is a $250 billion market globally, projected to double inside four years. The question is whether the allocation is structured to capture partnership returns, or whether it is structured, by default, to capture media returns on capital the business could deploy more efficiently.

Reach is the metric a publisher sells. Trust is the asset a creator owns.

Leon Harlow, Group Commercial Director at YMU, the UK's largest talent management business, has worked both sides of the table. He began his career brand-side at Unilever during the Keith Weed era, moved into talent management, and now leads commercial strategy across YMU's entertainment, music, and sport divisions. His observation on where brands misallocate their creator capital is precise.

The reach orthodoxy is a holdover from the media-buying model. It treats a creator audience as inventory. A number of eyeballs, a CPM, a view-through conversion. That architecture was built to monetise publisher audiences the brand did not own and could not influence. Applied to creator economics, it produces two predictable failures. The first is that reach without trust underperforms. A creator with ten thousand deeply engaged followers now outperforms one with twenty thousand casually engaged followers across almost every commercial metric brands care about. The second is that the media-buying contract structure prevents the brand from capturing any of the compounding value the creator generates once the campaign ends.

Creators have stopped behaving like media assets

Aarti Bhaskaran, Global Head of Research and Insights at Snap, frames the operational reclassification in the terms her own research has surfaced. Her position, in her own words, is that we cannot say creators are up and coming. They are here, the category is worth $250 billion globally, and it is going to double in the next four years.

Her core observation is that creators have stopped behaving like media assets and started behaving like businesses. Over a third now operate with platform-specific content strategies. They run analytics, hire agents, build production teams, and increasingly refuse to be directed into formats their community has not been primed for. Bhaskaran's research makes the practical consequence unambiguous. The brand that specifies rigid creative parameters and expects channel-style execution is buying the wrong product from the wrong counterparty. The creator who accepts those terms is the creator who is destroying their community in real time, which erodes the brand's return as a second-order effect.

The implication for the budget line is straightforward. A media-buying relationship treats the creator as a vendor delivering against specification. A partnership relationship treats the creator as a creative principal contributing to a shared outcome. The first model applies inappropriate governance to a counterparty who cannot deliver under it. The second model applies the governance the economics require.

Equity stakes, revenue shares, and the compounding layer

Harlow's operational evidence for the reclassification is where the commercial case becomes difficult to dispute. YMU now runs partnerships where talent take equity stakes in brands. The commercial thesis of the YMU Venture Fund is that talent who build businesses, rather than sell campaigns, compound value for both sides of the partnership over years, not over campaign windows.

The capital-allocation conclusion follows directly. A brand running its creator budget as placement capital is structurally excluded from the upside the creator generates after the campaign ends. The creator's next audience, their next product launch, their next platform pivot, all of it happens outside the brand's participation because the contract was written for media, not for partnership. The brands that structure equity, revenue-share, or product co-development arrangements with creators are capturing the compounding layer. The brands that buy placements are paying for attention and absorbing the opportunity cost of everything the partnership model would have delivered.

This is partnership capital. The term distinguishes capital deployed against a co-principal relationship from capital deployed against a media contract. It is a balance-sheet classification question that determines what upside the brand is entitled to.

Six in ten campaigns already breach the usage rights they signed

The third force making the reclassification unavoidable is the rights infrastructure, which until recently was invisible and is now becoming a material risk. Ben Woollams, CEO and Founder of TrueRights, built the company after eight years in influencer marketing uncovered a systemic exposure most brands did not know they carried. His team studied campaigns where the terms had been agreed, and monitored how the content was being used against those terms.

The breach rate is driven by the absence of infrastructure, not by bad intent. Brands buy rights for hundreds of content assets, use a fraction of them, and store the documentation in decentralised personal files with inconsistent clauses, no standardisation, and no monitoring. The proliferation of generative AI has turned that passive exposure into an active one. When an AI tool can regenerate a creator's likeness, voice, or personality traits at scale, the difference between a licensed asset and an unlicensed one becomes a litigation question, not a compliance one.

Woollams's reframing captures where the category is heading. The creative economy was about content production. The attention economy was about views and engagement. The ownership economy is about who controls, licenses, and monetises the intellectual property generated inside the partnership. Brands that entered the creator category under attention-economy assumptions are now operating inside an ownership-economy legal environment, with contract architecture built for the earlier phase. The gap between the two is where the litigation exposure lives.

Six rows that tell the CFO what kind of creator organisation you are

The table below is a diagnostic. A marketing organisation operating against more than two rows in the left column is running creator capital through an architecture the category has already outgrown. The issue is whether the current architecture is capturing the return the same capital would generate under a partnership structure.

The question every CMO should rehearse before the next budget review

The CMO who can answer the question below with a named roster and a quantified upside is running partnership capital. The CMO who cannot is running placement capital against a category that has already moved. The difference is not campaign sophistication. It is whether the capital deployed against the creator line is structured to participate in the economic category the creator operates in.

The creator economy is a $250 billion market. The brands that treat it as media will capture a share of the media return. The brands that treat it as partnership will capture a share of the business the partnership builds. Both outcomes are available to the same capital. Only one is currently being claimed.

Contributing Practitioners

The voices behind this piece

This analysis is distilled from long-form interviews conducted on The Business of Marketing podcast with three practitioners working across talent management, platform research, and digital rights infrastructure.

Leon Harlow

Group Commercial Director

YMU

Aarti Bhaskaran

Global Head of Research & Insights

Snap

Ben Woollams

CEO & Founder

TrueRights